Commodity crunch is here

No, this isn't about pork bellies In just the last few weeks EMC and IBM have announced their intentions to offer commodity server-based storage. EMC with Hulk/Maui and IBM with XIV. Sun already offers its Thumper product, a high-density server and storage chassis...

EMC’s new flash drives

About time I'm in Silicon Valley for a few days. So I'll keep this brief. EMC is pulling out the stops. First Hulk/Maui clusters and now putting flash SSDs in the Symm. They are positioning it as technology leadership, which it isn't, but it is marketing leadership....

2008: cluster storage goes mainstream

Enough of Google's bathtub brew IBM's purchase of XIV makes it official: cluster storage is on a roll. XIV's website could have been ripped from the webpages of StorageMojo: . . . enterprise-class storage systems typically comprise proprietary, special-purpose...

StorageMojo’s Las Vegas weekend

I'm off to America's Sin City for a weekend of good clean storage fun. I'm attending Tom Coughlin's Storage Visions conference. Then I'm sticking around on Monday to take in a few hours of CES, a show I've never attended. There are some storage-related firms whose...

The StorageMojo 2007 prediction scorecard

Can't win 'em all - darn it! A year ago I offered predictions for 2007 (see 2007 in review) and it was with deep foreboding that I went back to look at them. Cynic or optimist? Here's the list and my take on each prediction. Cloud computing? -CIOs realized they are at...

Fusion io does the hard part

Fast, high-capacity flash drive Fusion-io's impressive demo at DEMOfall07 piqued my interest (see Fusion io - great demo. Now comes the hard part.) and skepticism. They've announced some pricing and refined the specs. The ioDrive The ioDrive is a PCIe x4 card with 80,...

Sun/NetApp suit update

Some Christmas cheer Some, not a lot. According to Sun, there have been some significant changes in the mutual lawsuits: In November, the two parties agreed to litigate their mutual lawsuits in northern California instead of east Texas. They are litigating both the...

FastMail fights data corruption

Email is the largest personal database for most people. Easy to search, my gigabyte of email contains contacts, documents, notes and the record of many relationships. I back it up both locally and remotely. But how do I know it isn't corrupted? FastMail's email data...